From Michelle LaLonde, The Gazette

When Steve Siozios opened his tiny cigar bar on Crescent Sreet. 10 years ago, friends told him he was crazy.

“Everybody called me an idiot; they said cigar bars are passe, they’ll fade out of style. Now all the bars and restaurants resent me for being so lucky,” chuckled Siozios, the amiable owner of Stogies Cigar Lounge on Crescent St. in downtown Montreal.

What’s suddenly so lucky about owning a cigar bar in Quebec?

[more…]

Westin Hotels and Resorts is going smoke-free next month and will add $200.00 to the bill of anyone who violates the policy, said Senior Vice President Sue Brush. Smoking indoors and poolside will be banned at all 77 of the chain’s properties in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean beginning January 1. After that date, smokers will have to go to a designated outdoor area, she said.

Eight Westin hotels were previously designated smoke-free, and at least 5 percent of the rooms at the others had been set aside for nonsmokers, Brush said. But market research found that 92 percent of Westin’s guests were requesting nonsmoking rooms, and some of those who couldn’t get them were “quite upset,” she said.

Brush said that customers will be advised about the anti-smoking policy at check-in. If a guest violates the rule — “when we can observe it by smelling it or whatever” — a $200.00 fee will be added to the bill.

Hang on folks, we’re just getting warmed up.

[more…]

Mike at Fumo Santo writes about a developing trend that…well…brings a song to my heart.

“…buy me some peanuts and a Montecristo white, I don’t care if I never . . . “

Okay, maybe I’d better stick to writing prose. Rhyming is for professionals.

The real news is that there are plans by Pittsburgh Pirates management to install a cigar and martini bar called the Montecristo Club at PNC Park for season ticket holders next year. As you might predict, there is the expected protest by militant non-smokers who don’t want the stadium air sullied by smoke from high-priced cigars while they watch baseball.

The protests are falling on deaf ears for a very interesting reason. Plans for the Montecristo Club cigar bar are going ahead anyway.

Why?

[more…]

From Matthew Temple, Financial Times:

A mansion on Sands Point, Long Island, is an unlikely setting for social rebellion. But while the rest of New York State was stubbed out with smoking bans, that was where interior designer Jamie Gibbs created his first smoking room.

With dark English walnut wall panels, oriental rugs and bookcases fronted with brass grilles, it was commissioned by a Wall Street cigar aficionado who wanted “an image of old fashioned machismo” and was successful enough to render the opinion of others irrelevant. “When every newspaper and every doctor is telling you not to smoke there’s a certain decadence when you not only smoke, you create a space to do it in,” Gibbs says.

After Sands Point came smoking dens in Manhattan and Montclair, New Jersey, and a few spots in between, many prompted by bans, (perhaps inspired by the smoking tent Arnold Schwarzenegger erected on the lawn of the California governor’s mansion) and all capturing a feel Gibbs calls “private speakeasy”, a mix of the forbidden and the historic.

[more…]

From Cigar Jack comes a tip about the Georgetown Cigar Party, a protest against the anti-smoking legislation recently passed in the state of Washington.

I’m in the process of getting more information from contacts in Washington which I hope to pass along later today, but the gist of the idea is to have a protest modelled after the Boston Tea Party. It will be held on Friday, December 2, 2005 from 3:00 to 6:00 pm at Rain City Cigar, 5963 Corson Ave., S., Suite 130, Seattle, Washington. Phone number for the store is (206) 767-3619 and their email address is raincitycigar@qwest.net.

Some of the tobacco industry people who will be at the Party include: Patrick Dewitt of General Cigar Co., Steve Martin of Altadis USA, and Don Hanes of Monarch Marketing. The event is being characterized in a flyer put out by Rain City Cigar as “an Act of Resistance,” where “great blue clouds of smoke” will be cast into the air before a copy of Initiative 901 will be symbolically thrown into the trash and the group will prepare for a protest march on Washington’s capital, Olympia.

[more…]

There is a very interesting post up over at Our House Blog by David on the comparative health risks of smoking cigarettes versus smoking cigars.

It is a good post, with links to some information from the National Cancer Institute and also has some quotations from FDA spokespeople and the New England Journal of Medicine. Anyone who smokes cigars will want to read it.

The information in the article is an anti-smoking crusader’s worst nightmare.

Why?

[more…]